One of the winners from the 2009 “dance your thesis” AAAS/Science Dance Contest, based on a PhD entitled “Resolving Pathways of Functional Coupling in Human Hemoglobin Using Quantitative Low Temperature Isoelectric Focusing of Asymmetric Mutant Hybrids.”
Read MoreFebruary, 2009 Monthly archive
Last night I spent a few hours chatting on twitter with @jesshutchinson and @chriswalts (among others) about ways in which the theatre/twitter community might better share news and information.
I use various techniques to filter and search twitter – starting with tweetdeck and twitter’s own API - but I only have one pair of eyes. If I’m lucky, an interesting story or commentary will get re-tweeted somewhere across my network of followeds (neologism alert) and I’ll pick up that ripple. But I can only spend so much time each day combing twitter. Part of me thinks I should stop trying to drink the waterfall through a straw, but the maven thinks that there could – should – be a better solution.
So: how to use the distributed theatre/twitter community to flag things I (and other people) might like to read?
The very (very) rough concept that I arrived at was a WP installation that combed the #theatre hashtag for tweets with links, then published them on an hourly basis. Readers could then rate each link up (or down) and the most popular / most discussed recent links appear in the side-bar.
It was a trial concept, rather than a finished product; a starting place for a discussion rather than a destination for a diverse community.
So – what are the advantages to this kind of approach? What are the obvious problems? How might this approach integrate with twitter groups?
- EDIT: Am also playing with the tweetsuite plug-in, which sadly only works on newly published posts. Any good?
I spent some time this weekend at the Making and Thinking event talking about the performance of memes. Somewhere along the way I suggested that we might want to look at the involvement of audiences with the production and reproduction of memes as a way in which communities and identities are formed: a system of temporary, repeatable allegiances and identifications.
Queer theory suggests that this is how all subjectivities are formed; networked cultures make this procedural creation more apparent. But mainly I shared some links (performing live-action annotation like a fleshy delicious.com) while twitter obligingly provided an obscenity-free introduction to the world of tweets. It’s possible, though, that I should have spent some time answering a more obvious question: why study the performance of memes at all? So, some very rough thoughts on possible answers.
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